Child vaccination effort underway in N.B.: Your questions answered

Now that kids aged five to 11 are eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine, parents are wondering if they should book  appointments for their kids.

Although the pandemic has made the choice extra pressing for parents, the conversation about vaccines is not new.

"Parents are always concerned about giving any vaccine or medication to their children," said Dr. Scott Halperin, director of the Canadian Centre  for Vaccinology, professor of pediatrics and microbiology and immunology at Dalhousie University, and head of pediatric infectious diseases at the IWK Health Centre. 

"They want to know whether it's safe. They want to know it's effective. We want to know if there's going to be side-effects and they want to know is it better to give them the vaccine or not?"

On Monday, CBC's Information Morning Saint John put some parents' questions to Halperin and Dr. Sarah Gander, a general pediatrician in Saint John and co-founder of the New Brunswick Social Pediatrics Research Program and Clinical Program. 

Q: People have concerns about the long-term research that's been done on the vaccine. How did this come together so quickly and how would you allay some of those concerns? 

Gander says the COVID-19 vaccine is a result of "all hands on deck" by governments, scientists and researchers toward a common goal.

"It feels fast because it happened quickly, relative to other technologies that we've experienced in medicine, but really, vaccines as a technology is not a new thing, as most people know," she said. "And so, taking the literature that we already knew and adapting it to a new antigen or a new virus really made a whole lot of sense."

In addition to this, the vaccine being made for children means that it's shown to be safe and effective in adults, says Dr. Halperin.

Medical experts test adults first then go down the age brackets to teens and school-age children. By separating children into groups, where some get a higher dose and some get a lower dose, then checking for an immune response and any  adverse reactions, researchers can determine if the vaccine is safe and effective.

"What you've seen here so far is just the usual way that we test the safety and make sure the vaccine is safe," Halperin said.

"While we know school-age children are approved now, those same types of studies are being done in children under five years of age, so that within several more months, we'll have the information [to] make a decision whether or not the vaccine will be available for children even younger [with] the full approval of Health Canada."

Q. Many parents have heard that children are largely unaffected by COVID-19. Is that true? And if so, do they really need the vaccine?

"I understand that people feel that when children contract the COVID virus, they don't necessarily get 'as sick' as what we've seen in some of the adult populations," Gander said. "I would disagree that they've been unaffected."